Monday, January 18, 2010

Today, driving home, I heard three songs in a row, that were apropos to my mood. This one, Simple Minds:

This one by OMD:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XJfKyHR5-1M

And New Order, True Faith:

I miss the 80's sometimes.

So news. I'm now unemployed. My formerly part time job became full time, and I was unable to take it. Mostly for the good, though I will miss the money. That is what it had become. So now I have time. We still have a Christmas guest who will go home next Saturday. Then I will have even more time, something one who tries to write goes on about. Guilty as charged. Therefore I have a two pronged plan. I will eventually find another part time job, but in that interim, I am hoping to really get some writing done. Some real writing, not the sort that I have so far. I write in bits and pieces, and honestly, I feel like it looks like that too. I can't retain any sort of flow in that, and the interruption really keeps me from making headway.

::pauses for interruption by arguing children:: ::begins again::

See.

Anyway, my 2007 resolutions are still on the table. I put together a list back then of how I'd want to write given the time. I've been given the time. Sometimes life does give you what you need, and luckily I'm fortunate enough to be able to take this pause, however long it might be, or not, to actually do something I want to do.

In other news, I've been catching up on reading. Another thing which had gone to the wayside. (The wayside must be a very filled place.)

Andrew Philip's The Ambulance Box. Buy this if you can. It's sneaky. If you didn't know the center of the book, you would still love it anyway. And if you do know the center, or have experienced it yourself, then you will be blown away. Lullaby in particular. It's is very touching.

this is the man you fathered-
his voided love, his writhen pride and grief

After our son died, I scoured books to find some semblance of something of what I was experiencing. There wasn't much. Since then I've collected a group of poems that did work or got near, and now I've added this collection to it. Simply amazing. The Invention of Zero is another poem here that stunned me too.

What like was it
this abundant world

where nothing was not-
no neat ring

shackling us to absence
no way not

His twisty words, never what they should be, because this experience is not how or what it should be. Andrew also layers English and Scots. I don't know Scots, having never read it before, but it still reads as a sort of shadowed English, so there is understanding, but no understanding. Again, like this experience.

But the experience is not the whole. The poetry is the core center. Another thing I've noticed, and have written myself, is poetry that can't escape the experience. The experience has to be there, but if it's not poetry, good poetry, only the experience remains. That isn't enough to be poetry. Andrew escapes the experience enough to get the poetry there. Outside of the experience, but fully within it. Success. I keep dipping back in, and seeing more, reminding me of more, both of his own experience, and my own. That is cool. I don't mind reminders, and in fact they are comforting.